The rest of the world might be scared off from investing in US rocket companies if the problems that Virgin are having drag on to long. If it gets to hard then Virgin might back out of their deal with Scaled and return people's deposits.

If it is this difficult then what are the chances of someone like Starchaser competing for the ASP going to be?

EDIT: As an additional thought will this regulation apply to Starchaser so that it cant fly its rockets outside the US once it has established a base there. That really would p*** me off.

_________________A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

I think it's rubbish that they can control the 'possible use of rockets for possible military use' in this manner. If you really would want to use a suborbital spaceship for passengers for military use, i wouldn't do it by the book you know. It's like asking the store you're gonna rob if they would kindly open the door for you and then help you with putting the money in the bag, without any gun or knife. Now, how many stores would actually help you?

Prevention is better then to cure, but this is kinda paranoia. You can perfectly make a bomb with a lot of 'ingredients' you can buy at your local supermarket. Are they preventing the supermarkets to sell? No, because the product alone is not a weapon. So is the suborbital ss2 from Rutan.

Another 'example'. Why doesn't the US prevent cars from exporting? You could use it to delive a car bomb you know.

If this sounds ridiculous to you, that's the same i feel about the 'export rules' of the US at this moment.

the difference between us is that you seem to to base your understanding of Rutan's words on the context of the article only while I myself base my own understanding on more and much more than the context of the article only - and this I call a broader and wider context that includes knowledge not provided by that article, knowledge and informations ín principle everyone has. And these knowledge and informations exclude some understandings including yours.

Under www.xprizenews.org there is the article "US export rules frustrate Virgin" ( news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4506133.stm ). It is quoting Rutan:

Quote:

"The process just about ruined my programme," he said. "It resulted in cost overruns, increased the risk for my test pilots, did not reduce the risk to the non-involved public, destroyed our 'always question, never defend' safety policy and removed our opportunities to seek new innovative safety solutions."

Mr Rutan said the problems arose because the same rules that applied to unmanned, expendable boosters were being applied to passenger spaceships.

The risks of unmanned rocket launches are assessed on the basis of failure scenarios - involving calculations of, for example, how many people might be killed or hurt if an explosion occurred just after lift-off.

Instead, passenger-carrying spaceships, like airlines, needed to be handled with a focus on reducing the probability of failure, Mr Rutan said.

"The regulatory process was grossly misapplied for our research tests and, worse yet, is likely to be misapplied for the regulation of the future commercial space liners," Mr Rutan added.

This is a complete argumentation which means that Rutan really doesn't want to be regulated because to be regulated means his programme to be ruined nearly - and especially the words about misappliance show that he doesn't want to be regulated. Writing this I have in mind the broader and wider context outside the articles permanently.

We are reading the same words but I apply a wider and broader context than you. And this wider and broader context really has the impacts I already explaned - this is intensively and long researched by my science.

It allways is useful to clarify the background of thinking. There are theories about regulation and all these theories togther are called Theory of Regulation. This family of theories is part of my science. It belongs to the sub-discipline Theory and Politics of Competition.

So I am used to articles about regulations - to articles like those quoted in this thread. It is impossible to understand them correctly if only the articles are read. The articles can't be understood of their own never because regulations are too complex.

So my previous post was meant to clarify that Peter and me don't read the same words and interpret them different but that I apply something Peter does NOt apply.

The previous article wasn't meant as an argument - and I don't want a new "spiral orbit thread" too... .

Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

EDIT: I have in mind that we a re talking in the public here which means that there can be a lot of people reading them as time goes by and to these the background should be informed about and clarified too.

Plus my responsibility as Economist to transfer my economic knowledge to others here for increasing and improving their own background.

Here's the Washingtons Post's article on regulation, it says that by law the FAA has until the end of the year to address crew and passenger safety. So why is Burt Rutan saying that they are ignoring the issue when they are required to make provision for it in the regulations? I think that perhaps we have been concentraying to much on what Rutan is saying and should look wider afield for different views to get a better picture of what is actually going on.

This is a shift away from the debate between Peter Campell and me - which is positive because it provides a look into another aspect.

As I understand the debate between Rutan and the House Rutan has in mind the safety of the non-involved - whereas the FAA demands measurements for the case of explosion, accident and the like Rutan says that the focus has to be on the prevention of explosion, accident and the like: in order to prevent damaging the non-involved.

The responsibility of the FAA for safety of crew and passengers ends at the end of the year for eight years because of the recently passed bill about suborbital spaceflight. Rutan is talking about another topic than the article you provide a link to

Andy Hill, you are quite right - different views from different points and under different aspects are required: regulation is a complex topic.

This thread should go on but I am thinking about an additional thread about regulation because I have been speaking about transfer of knowledge at the end of my previous post and of the complexity of regulation in that post. I will apply that thread to space vehicles etc. of course and provide some links to this thread and others perhaps.

This article by Taylor Dinerman in the Space Review seems to suggest that Europe used the ITAR rules as an excuse not to work with NASA, apparantly because the EU wants to create a super power to rival the US and have its own military space assets.

Total crap.

Even if the EU does want to do these things, and however unlikely there is no reason why it shouldn't, what has this got to do with working on a Mars craft with NASA?

Mr Dinerman has over looked the obvious that ESA thought that it would be to much grief working around the regulations when they have the alternative of sending their own rover, gaining more experience of the problems associated with a Mars landing and swapping information with NASA from 2 rovers as an equal rather than a junior partner on a single vehicle. What has any of this got to do with Europe wanting to be a super state?

None are so blind as those who will not see. Europe will do what it wants with regard to creating military space assets irrespective of US regulations (much as the US does with respect to Europe). IMO I do not think that Europe will ever fully integrate militarily as there are to many cultural differences between us, but there is no reason why we cant work together on peaceful space projects and have a joint space policy.

I find it amazing that someone fails to see that the regulations are the problem rather than some supposed conspiricy going on in the background. ESA has cooperated with NASA on plenty of projects in the past and will do so again in the future but the US must recognise that if they want to work with other national space agencies its no good starting from a point of mistrust generated by the ITAR rules.

I wish I was an industrial spy. Somehow or other, Boeing managed to sell Air France 777s to use for their cargo planes. How that happened...I'd like to know. Like how quickly Boeing got its EELV contracts back during the same time period Stonecipher's affair came out--and he was run off. And now Orbital Sciences gets busted by Feds.

It would not surprise me that Boeing-bought blue-suits and their spooks in the Air Farce are behind a lot of this. Same with regulation.